Because various circumstances I think lately a lot about the nature of war. Not about the K-Mart-style of BS way that Americans are involved nowadays but rather about a true nature War. The subject of unjust consequences under unmanaged circumstance during war is something that bothers me and diabolically fascinates me.

Thinking about war during the last week or two I was thinking about musical interpretation of war and I truly do not feel that anything meaningful was composed as least at the magnitude that I would like it to see. Looking at the music that I know war thymes are played with sorrows, tragedy, patriotism and hardship, it is not my interest war program. I would like war music to be unjustly absurd, the incongruously ridicules but subordinated by very firm and very talentedly developed super idea, some kind of Picasso’s Guernica implemented in musical forms, but without sentimentalism and without idiocy of pop-culture stamps.  I never heard such music composed. lately I feel to compose my own war composition but I do not know if I have an interest to write music down…

drdna wrote:

For some reason your description made me immediately think of Alfred Schnittke's Gogol Suite. What do you think?

The Gogol Suite is very different Music. The Suite has that scorny spiral development where the second shoe never drops and the spiral cycles never finish but instead they become building blocks for new, even more ridicules development. The Suites are hugely entertaining as they meant to be entertaining, or more precisely - to be sarcasm – a very tasteful and very intelligent satire about Soviet society. Through I see where you are coming in your thinking – sort of self-conscious spiral meaningless (and I would like to have many of those moments to be incorporated into the War Music) but I see the War Music from a different angle. Gogol Suite is in away Nabokov’s or Pelevin’s literature where sophisticated expressionism in many instances self-purposed and not necessary loaded with immediate service to main intentions. In my vision of “perfect” War Music I would like music to be absolutely free from empty self-embellishment, from jazz, or from process for a sake of a process..

Pretend the 4th movement of Shostakovich 5th symphony. In the second part of the movement where Shostakovich just begin to build up the pressure before the final culmination there are a few amassing parses that I always associate with distressing patience being innocently incarcerated. The tragic in this patience is in disability of change anything and in becoming completely subordinate to the circumstances that were your choice. In War that sensations of the unjust punishment gets multiplied by million times and the distress of causality and reasons avalanches.  Also the circumstances that force to embrace the War engagement convert participants from victims to involuntary executioners, the self-executioners in many cases.

So, in War Music I look for complexly new level of musical masochistic self-destructives. Perhaps the self-destructives those only perhaps women can afford under narrow circumstances, the self-destructives that goes across multiple Gogol Suites’ spiral layers, the self-destructives that has no glory, no grandeur of witnessing. I look for a complete introverted cataclysm, sort of Hiroshima exposure in a glass of water, but the self-destructives has a connection to everything and everybody else, not just about personal heartbreak of War experiences. It was told that a death of a person is as tragedy but a death of thousands people is just a statistic. I think it is very accurate observation and it is what I would be interested to take further with War Music. I look less at the tragedy part of War but rather into causality, atypical circumstances, the freedom of participant’s self-destructives and inevitability of tragic result. I would like in the War Music all presentations artificiality of Wars were combined, planted and grow up within the music, grow but without any attention or spent efforts for musical artificial fertilization.  Sort of the Gogol Suite’s over and over the few first notes of the Shostakovich 5th symphony’s opining.

I can see some very brief moments of what I looking in Wagner but he had very different goals and very different ways to talk about the things. I do not know who does what I looking for. Besides the War Music itself I would like the War Music to have very different Sound. The concept of instrumentation is spoiled in history by bad instrumentation attempts and I would like War Music was raw by nature and free from “man-made instrumentation”. I think War’s incapability to change anything beside own absurd self-destructives does have own sound. I would like War Music use this sound, and to talk with this voice. There is no need for more sound in War Music. Otherwise, how to explain War during our piece time?

two humorous tracks covering the absurdity angle:

KMFDM - World War III

http://www.box.net/shared/static/44trt6z63q.mp3

Punish Yourself - CNN War

http://www.box.net/shared/static/ek43yunrso.mp3

and two serious ones with a rather original take on the matter:

Welle Erdball - Starfighter F104-G

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wn5pIY-j2To

Fatboy Slim - Sunset ( Bird of Prey )